First off, most people don't really use their PCs for all that much. People talk about running sophisticated code on their home machines but they tend to be the exception. Most people want to surf the web, read and write mail, play games, movies and music and that's sufficient for them. A PSX2 is actually overkill for everything but games.
Second off, while TVs are not an ideal display device, if there isn't a monitor adapter somewhere for them, I'll be extremely surprised. That makes things a lot more readable. But strangely enough I think we're really going to end up waiting for the flat panel market before people really start dumping their televisions for plugging their consoles into.
Third off, no need to assume that people will just have one of them in the house. These things will drop to the $150 and even to the $100 range in time. That makes having two or three affordable to a far wider audiance. That leads to the next point.
Fourth off, yes, they are limited compared to PCs, but envision a home network of PSX2 boxes linked by ethernet to a Linux box that serves as a file/printer server as well as gateway. Not that I envision that PSX2 boxes will be usable in a configuration like that, but my vision of home computing is that PC's will eventually evolve into home servers while the consoles become the home network computers that plug into them. The PCs can run Linux (or even some icky OS) and be the servers that run continuously plugged into the Net as well as being the focal point for commonly used devices such as printers. If Sony was really thinking though, they'd copy Apple and produce their own version of the Airport. That would encourage multiple PSX2's in one house and increase their sales through easy wireless networking.
The fifth point is that it has been pointed out that PCs did a lot of damage to the minicomputer market by eroding it from below. Exactly the same thing is happening now to the PC market. PC folks are scoffing in nearly identical fashions to what the minicomputer folks said about PCs.
However, the sixth point is that there is going to be trouble here. All Sony has to do is put a Java virtual machine on their PSX2 and that destroys their whole economic model. Sony makes money by charging a fee to developers who produce and sell software on their consoles. The moment someone puts a Java machine on, which allows anyone to code and load software and run it on a PSX2 without giving a cut to Sony, everything falls apart.
In time, we're going to see the collision between the PC free development model (and bitch all you like about Microsoft, they don't try to control who writes what on their machines) and the console controlled development model. I think in the end we'll see a bump up in console prices and the PC model taking over. It probably won't happen from a traditional vendor, or if it does, through a court case.
So in short I see these things shoving PC's up into the high end server market, where the modularity of the PC and its flexibility are a real advantage. However in colliding with the PC market they are going to be changed by the more robust PC economic model. A home will have a console plugged into the big screen television and associated stereo system (eliminating the need for an MP3 box in the stereo rack), but there will be a couple of others in the house for personal network computer use and networked game play.
Quartz is Neat Stuff. Aqua is a little more icky in my personal opinion. Tog had some very interesting comments on the Aqua user interface that should be forwarded along with this article to the GNOME/KDE people with a small footnote appended saying: learn from this
I agree with the Ars Technica article about this vector based technology being the third generation. The idea isn't new, it came from NeXT, but its being incorporated in a mainstream OS. The Microsoft camp is going to have to start thinking up their own version of this now, if they want to keep up. Apple has once more raised the bar on them in terms of innovation.
As for the Linux camp, I think that this is something that definitely needs to be worked into the libraries. I want to see a user interface that has the cool vector-based effects of Quartz coupled to a redefinable interface like what GNOME or KDE supports. That becomes the ultimate in coolness, even if it chews up a lot of CPU power to pull off.
1. Wireles eliminating cable is not going to happen. There is a problem in that most homes and a lot of other places are not wired, and so wireless will be used to take care of that as a stopgap measure. Wired connections will always have a serious edge in bandwidth over wireless connections, and so be the prefered option when available.
However, I see homes and businesses being a combination of wired and wireless. Things plugged into walls and stationary will be wired and things that rove around the house and out of it will be wireless. But the Airport will last only as a desktop/server to laptop/handheld solution. Even then people will use docking stations.
2. This is true, though I think it may take longer than a year for people to calm down about it. In time having a.com will be considered the normal price of doing business, much as companies today do not make a big deal about having telephones.
3. MP3 will last a very long time, until some other public domain format becomes popular. Maybe some sort of wavelet compression. Even then MP3 will last a tremendously long time as a legacy format. In time the music industry will break down and figure out how to survive in the digital age.
4. Linux will have a decent presence in the embedded market, but it will be one among many, and I don't see more than a token presence for a while. It's a high end embedded system, for set top boxes and the like. I predict that Linux will continue to erode the Windows NT niche and start making inroads elsewhere.
Expect to see by the end of the year an explosion of non-American software for Linux as universities and governments outside of the United States demand software solutions that are non-Microsoft. Expect American companies to cash in on this and make money off of these other software developers, thus hitting Microsoft from the outside in. Finally Linux will be perceived as a desktop solution for the high end.
5. Next year will still not be the year of video entertainment over the Net. Nor will the next year be. We've got a few more years to go on that point until we see the cheap net video stations.
6. Its going to take years for the stock market to fade to normal. But this is really a repeat of 2 so I won't go into it.
Are there any types of slotted cards now that would be unsuitable under the new form of architecture. What about graphics cards, for example?
Also, can all of the I/O ports that we currently have on the back of a PC be comfortably handled by this new architecture?
Then there's the discussion of impacts to case and motherboard designs assuming one removes the slots entirely. Power supply was mentioned, but are there any less obvious ones, such as drive bays?
>It seems the advantages of HURD over Linux or FreeBSD, such as they are, are expandability and scalability rather than functionality. I wonder how attractive HURD will be, however, once Linux and FreeBSD have completely multi-threaded, modularized kernels.....
>Moreover, granted that the FSF goal is to get everyone using their software, I wonder if HURD has anything to convince people, and most importantly industry, to switch.
>It also seems as if it will take a year or two for HURD to be stable; in a year or two, FreeBSD and Linux are going to be so far ahead in hardware support, stability, and in functionality that HURD would seem to be useless.
>In sum, HURD seems to be a failed attempt of the FSF to totally conquer the Open Source world, an attempt doomed from the start. In truth, they are about five-ten years too late.
Actually, you're missing the whole point to Hurd. Hurd is not in competition with Linux, any more than say, OpenBSD is in competition with Linux (which it is not, incidentally).
Linux is a general purpose kernel based on familiar and well understood technology that tries to be as many things as it can be without compromising any of its existing functionality. It is a monolithic kernel with a lot of modularity built in, but still old technology.
Hurd is something of a research project aimed at the Next Generation Kernel (or Next Generation Microkernel). Trying to create a viable operating system with as much modularity as possible. Once you have a stable microkernel, you can leave the system up and upgrade vast segments of the operating system that would force even Linux to reboot.
It is not aimed at displacing Linux any more than Linux is aimed at displacing Windows. Some might say that is Linux's purpose, but others have stated that Linux is simply trying to be the best operating system it can be, with World Domination as a secondary goal. Hurd is trying to be the best kernel it can be.
And here's an interesting point. There is nothing to say that the two groups can't use each other's code, because they're both under GPL. If the Hurd group is intelligent, they'll try to take advantage of the code base of Linux and not reinvent the wheel implementing functionality already present in Linux, especially for things like hardware support.
For that matter, the Linux people might decide after a certain point that they can't modularize anymore without going to a microkernel based setup. At which point they join the Hurd project, fork off the Hurd code base, or start from scratch using information gathered from Hurd's work. In any such case Hurd will have fufilled its purpose.
In short, I think Hurd is an important part of the future of Linux, as part of determining where Linux will go in the future.
I'm now going to have nightmares of Tux with that funny mask throwing roses all thanks to you. Or maybe he should be throwing CD-ROMs (a lot more damage capacity with those puppies than a rose)
The article was pretty good for the most part except that I feel the author missed a few points as well.
One of the big factors that killed the N64 was lack of third party developer support, including the defections of some big Nintendo supporters in previous console generations. The reason for that was the fact that the N64 used ROM instead of CD-ROM for their medium to distribute games. The cartridges were more expensive, had less space, and only Nintendo manufactured them.
Yes, you have to go jump through a few Sony hoops to produce a playstation game, but you're free to use your own CD-ROM burning plant you like, and due to the low per-CD cost, manufacturing a set number wasn't a huge expense. Given the freedom of going to whoever they wanted to manufacture them, they could make as many or as few as they wanted.
With Nintendo, you needed to order a minimum quantity of cartridges and those puppies were expensive. As a result it cost more, you took more of a risk, and Nintendo made even more profits than before. Even worse, everyone was learning on the Sega and Sony systems how to get around the limitations of CD-ROM and to take advantage of their strengths. On cartridges, you had a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses and that made cross-system ports bad as well as developers working outside of their area of experience.
Third party support is what made Sony king and what killed Nintendo in the latest rounds. Sony barely has any in-house development but they realized that didn't make much of a difference anymore. The Playstation was simpler to program than the Saturn and I mentioned all the Nintendo problems previously. This round, Sega learned from their mistakes, as has Nintendo. Sega deliberately focused on development tools and Nintendo is going with DVD-ROM so third party supporters won't be stuck in a weird medium.
As for the all-in-one machines, I do believe that we are more ready for it now than back in the days of the 3DO. The failure of the 3DO was the price point as well as some weird licensing issues involved. In the case of the new consoles, the cost is being kept to the same competitive levels as before while the functionality is getting to the point that you're going to have those features anyway. If not this next generation, then the one after that certainly will be.
If you think about the whole thin-client phenomena, then the consoles are well poised to be the home thin client phenomena. I can easily see a home LAN set up with several consoles plugged into a home network and a PC running as the server. A cheaper solution that putting PC's all over the place, and everyone gets the benefits of a centralized network server and probable Internet gateway as well. If you really want to get easy to use, put a Cobalt box in place of the PC with the Web-based administrative interface.
Now all the consoles have all the graphics and sound horsepower you need locally to run the games, the server on the network has all of the functionality that the console lacks and needs, and you have a cheap and easy to configure solution for the consumer market. The only hard part is making the home server easy enough for consumers to use.
In time, we might even see a console that drops the DVD-ROM drive and goes entirely through a network plug for remote storage. Given the cheaper cost of a network cable compared to the hardware needed for a local disc and the way consoles like to shave hardware costs down to the penny, that is only a matter of time as well, I feel. Using a network connection entirely means you can have infinite read/write storage elsewhere on the network. You lose the ability to play CD's and DVD's but you have MP3 and MP2 functionality in the box and you download the audio and video from elsewhere. A true thin client solution.
The only problem there is that it fiddles with the economics of the console industry, which exert control over the production of media and makes the royalty collection part rather difficult. That is going to be the really interesting thing, to see how the PC economic model goes against the console economic model. In short, it's going to be an interesting future.
Voice recognition wouldn't be of great use to me, at least at the desktop. I hate leaving prolonged voicemail messages because I can't go back and edit a previous sentence. I have to go and compose a speech if I want to sound intelligent and coherent.
Voice recognition only becomes useful to me if natural language parsing and enough cognition power are available for me to command my computer in plain english to a fair degree of abstraction.
In mobile computing, it might be a lot more useful, especially for a device, say the size of the Palm Pilot, where various factors make voice far more convenient and less difficult than other forms of input.
There are a lot of human use factors that complicate voice recognition (making the computer recognize when you want it to parse your speech and when you don't want it listening). Human interface issues often make these things less wonderful than they appear.
Not that I'm saying this isn't a wonderful development and there aren't people out there who could really use this (in specialized environments or people who have mechanical difficulties), but I don't think voice recognition is going to change the world the way some people think it will.
Something to bear in mind is that there is a lot more to a typical Linux system than the kernel. Hence RMS's insistance that it be called GNU/Linux because of all the GNU tools involved. And there's the GNOME/KDE wars which occur on a level above the kernel.
Twenty years from now the kernel itself will have changed and expanded somewhat, most likely. But I feel most of the real excitement to most people will be in the layers above the kernel.
VR user interfaces, voice recognition with natural language processing, these sorts of things are a level above the kernel and will be where a lot of the excitement comes in. Most users never really 'see' the kernel when you think about it.
Kernels to some extent are supposed to be boring. Stability and reliability and predictability are traits that you'd like in a kernel, rather than the edgy excitement of never knowing when you're going to get a BSOD.
As for Linux, I see long term things like greater modularity, more network transparency, improved resource management, security and so forth. Not exactly cutting edge stuff, but the foundations on which all applications depend on.
Not that these things won't be exciting, but a lot of it will be in an understated or hidden way. The fact that you won't have memory leaks or you'll have a hundred processors on a dozen machines working together seamlessly with no fear of someone cracking your system isn't exactly glamorous, but will be important.
And the creation of physics-perfect (or deliberately twisted) virtual realities and getting your computer to understand what you speak will be the exciting processes that run on top of a rock solid kernel. Not to mention all the fun applications and games you'll have.
"But I believe that the added costs of hiring more adept people, giving them the tools and resources (PCs) to use their abilities will give the company as a whole a competitive edge. THIS is the correct reason for moving from a mainframe/terminal setup."
In certain situations, yes. But at a place like say the bank or the DMV, the question is whether you need all those creative people and the freedom that their personal computers give them. Your ideal of a few creative people versus a lot of uncreative people only applies in certain working scenarios. At say, a retail store, I don't think getting rid of thirty uncreative clerks and replacing them with two creative clerks is going to improve service.
Certain jobs are inherently non-creative ventures and in some cases, you actually want to stick restrictions on them. Thin clients are more securable than PCs, if properly managed.
And even customization of tools doesn't write out the thin client scenario. Give the users who want special tools extra space on their disk partitions on the servers, or have them added to the application area of the disk server so everyone gets it. I use a workstation at work, but my user account comes off a server, which means that I can log into any workstation on the network and get to my account which has my.profile,.kshrc and all the other custom files that make my environment nice.
It really comes down to the degree of customization allowed by IS with respect to user accounts, and how much the client/server setup allows customization. PCs only have the advantage that IS is limited in the amount of homogenization they can remotely enforce. If you have a well considered setup, users will have all the freedom they want or need.
My suggestion is to require registration of a hidden account to let people post as Anonymous Cowards. The name that goes on the post is AC, but the scoring on the post is linked to their hidden account.
Therefore people who wish to post as AC and have a valid reason for concealing their identity may do so. It discourages casual posters and those who don't want to (or have moral objections to) register from posting, but in the long run I think it will improve things.
I started personal computing back in the late seventies when the Apple ][ was considered state of the art and practically every program in existance had some form of copy protection.
There was quite the underground industry in copy-protection breaking. Anyone remember Locksmith? The developers would think of all sorts of funky ways to tweak the Apple floppy drives and users would figure out what they did and duplicate it.
All these copy-protection schemes are going to lead to a cottage industry of mechanisms to break them. Essentially, if you hack a sound driver there's nothing the music companies can do.
MP3 has the user base and the only thing that is going to kill it is superior encoding scheme with a freely available encoder.
The advantage of Linux is that if you don't like what one Linux vendor comes out with, you can go vote with your dollars for another Linux vendor, plain and simple. You can't do that with Microsoft since they are the sole supplier of the OS.
So if you don't like Red Hat's decision not to include KDE with their version of Linux badly enough, complain to Red Hat and tell them that you're switching to another Linux vendor that will include KDE with their product.
If enough people do that, then Red Hat will relent. Its called competition, the free market, what you will. It is what keeps Red Hat or any other Linux vendor from charging $600 for the operating system and $100 for upgrades, the fact that other Linux vendors will compete, that the OS itself is freely available.
Red Hat can't control the market. It can try to lead the market and encourage standards but it can't force them the way that Microsoft did.
Onto the eternal GNOME/KDE flamewar, the average computer users don't want or need a choice of desktops and window managers. Or rather, what they want is a well established default setting that they can live with and not have to tamper with.
Red Hat and others realize this, and plan to establish GNOME and eventually some associated window manager as the default choice. Power users can go and use something else if it pleases them but the average user just wants to stick the CD-ROM in and have a nice desktop appear at the end of the process and not have to make a choice.
Choices scare the average end user, especially when they don't know the options involved or what it will cost them. They want good choices made for them already and in time if they don't like them, they can go modify them.
Computer manufacturers are also in the same boat. Most of them will need to come up with some sort of standardized installation for machines that they pre-install Linux on. Odds are good that it will end up being GNOME/Enlightenment as the default desktop.
Choice is important, but defaults are important too.
People assuming USB will be absorbed by Firewire are missing a few points about the whole purpose of USB. Its designed to be a cheap and flexible connector for low bandwidth devices, most especially devices that aren't expected to have an increase in bandwidth demands over time, and eliminate all other connectors in that area.
Keyboards have not significantly expanded their bandwidth demands over time. Likewise mice, game controllers and so on. You might make a case for speakers, microphones and suchlike, but even then there's a law of diminishing returns.
Firewire is aimed at the category of devices that like to use all the bandwidth available, and show benefits from said approach, like hard drives, video feed equipment and such.
Sure, you could stick a keyboard on a Firewire line but what's the point? The connector is likely to be more expensive and now you have to worry about your hard disk slowing down your typing speed. And given that the demands of technology will eventually force someone to design a whole new connector better than Firewire, you have to go and redesign your keyboards as well.
Connectors last until there's a real need to replace them. If USB is good enough as a connector, it can last next to forever. People who manufacture USB devices won't move off USB until its clear that their devices are going to benefit from it or they can't continue as they have in the past.
USB is getting established because there are limitations to serial, parallel and a list of other ports. USB can do things they can't and its a single standard they can all adhere to. Manufacturers and consumers will like having a single ubiquitous standard and won't move off of it until they have to.
In the case of Firewire, people are likely to keep demanding bigger pipes for all those high-bandwidth devices they plug into their machines, especially for those running servers. That will guarentee that someday Firewire will be replaced by something with a greater capacity than Firewire will ever have.
So Firewire attacks SCSI which attacked IDE, and someday some new connector is going to come out with pipes so huge that people who want their I/O to scream are going to instantly switch over to this new Firewire successor.
Granted, the swapover will be painful, but people needing those devices and that speed are likely to make the investment in a new connector technology for the gains that it will bring. To swap off of USB would require similar gains and given USB's niche, that ain't likely to happen.
Odds are we'll see a USB-2, possible with some superior data transmission protocols, but it won't be accepted unless its backwards compatible (or there's a simple adaptor plug available). But the evolution of USB given its modest target is going to be very slow.
In short, Firewire is going to attack SCSI which is attacking IDE, but USB is going after serial, parallel, and the like. The two are going after whole different breeds of periphial and so are not in direct competition with each other.
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First off, most people don't really use their PCs for all that much. People talk about running sophisticated code on their home machines but they tend to be the exception. Most people want to surf the web, read and write mail, play games, movies and music and that's sufficient for them. A PSX2 is actually overkill for everything but games.
Second off, while TVs are not an ideal display device, if there isn't a monitor adapter somewhere for them, I'll be extremely surprised. That makes things a lot more readable. But strangely enough I think we're really going to end up waiting for the flat panel market before people really start dumping their televisions for plugging their consoles into.
Third off, no need to assume that people will just have one of them in the house. These things will drop to the $150 and even to the $100 range in time. That makes having two or three affordable to a far wider audiance. That leads to the next point.
Fourth off, yes, they are limited compared to PCs, but envision a home network of PSX2 boxes linked by ethernet to a Linux box that serves as a file/printer server as well as gateway. Not that I envision that PSX2 boxes will be usable in a configuration like that, but my vision of home computing is that PC's will eventually evolve into home servers while the consoles become the home network computers that plug into them. The PCs can run Linux (or even some icky OS) and be the servers that run continuously plugged into the Net as well as being the focal point for commonly used devices such as printers. If Sony was really thinking though, they'd copy Apple and produce their own version of the Airport. That would encourage multiple PSX2's in one house and increase their sales through easy wireless networking.
The fifth point is that it has been pointed out that PCs did a lot of damage to the minicomputer market by eroding it from below. Exactly the same thing is happening now to the PC market. PC folks are scoffing in nearly identical fashions to what the minicomputer folks said about PCs.
However, the sixth point is that there is going to be trouble here. All Sony has to do is put a Java virtual machine on their PSX2 and that destroys their whole economic model. Sony makes money by charging a fee to developers who produce and sell software on their consoles. The moment someone puts a Java machine on, which allows anyone to code and load software and run it on a PSX2 without giving a cut to Sony, everything falls apart.
In time, we're going to see the collision between the PC free development model (and bitch all you like about Microsoft, they don't try to control who writes what on their machines) and the console controlled development model. I think in the end we'll see a bump up in console prices and the PC model taking over. It probably won't happen from a traditional vendor, or if it does, through a court case.
So in short I see these things shoving PC's up into the high end server market, where the modularity of the PC and its flexibility are a real advantage. However in colliding with the PC market they are going to be changed by the more robust PC economic model. A home will have a console plugged into the big screen television and associated stereo system (eliminating the need for an MP3 box in the stereo rack), but there will be a couple of others in the house for personal network computer use and networked game play.
Quartz is Neat Stuff. Aqua is a little more icky in my personal opinion. Tog had some very interesting comments on the Aqua user interface that should be forwarded along with this article to the GNOME/KDE people with a small footnote appended saying: learn from this
I agree with the Ars Technica article about this vector based technology being the third generation. The idea isn't new, it came from NeXT, but its being incorporated in a mainstream OS. The Microsoft camp is going to have to start thinking up their own version of this now, if they want to keep up. Apple has once more raised the bar on them in terms of innovation.
As for the Linux camp, I think that this is something that definitely needs to be worked into the libraries. I want to see a user interface that has the cool vector-based effects of Quartz coupled to a redefinable interface like what GNOME or KDE supports. That becomes the ultimate in coolness, even if it chews up a lot of CPU power to pull off.
1. Wireles eliminating cable is not going to happen. There is a problem in that most homes and a lot of other places are not wired, and so wireless will be used to take care of that as a stopgap measure. Wired connections will always have a serious edge in bandwidth over wireless connections, and so be the prefered option when available.
.com will be considered the normal price of doing business, much as companies today do not make a big deal about having telephones.
However, I see homes and businesses being a combination of wired and wireless. Things plugged into walls and stationary will be wired and things that rove around the house and out of it will be wireless. But the Airport will last only as a desktop/server to laptop/handheld solution. Even then people will use docking stations.
2. This is true, though I think it may take longer than a year for people to calm down about it. In time having a
3. MP3 will last a very long time, until some other public domain format becomes popular. Maybe some sort of wavelet compression. Even then MP3 will last a tremendously long time as a legacy format. In time the music industry will break down and figure out how to survive in the digital age.
4. Linux will have a decent presence in the embedded market, but it will be one among many, and I don't see more than a token presence for a while. It's a high end embedded system, for set top boxes and the like. I predict that Linux will continue to erode the Windows NT niche and start making inroads elsewhere.
Expect to see by the end of the year an explosion of non-American software for Linux as universities and governments outside of the United States demand software solutions that are non-Microsoft. Expect American companies to cash in on this and make money off of these other software developers, thus hitting Microsoft from the outside in. Finally Linux will be perceived as a desktop solution for the high end.
5. Next year will still not be the year of video entertainment over the Net. Nor will the next year be. We've got a few more years to go on that point until we see the cheap net video stations.
6. Its going to take years for the stock market to fade to normal. But this is really a repeat of 2 so I won't go into it.
Are there any types of slotted cards now that would be unsuitable under the new form of architecture. What about graphics cards, for example?
Also, can all of the I/O ports that we currently have on the back of a PC be comfortably handled by this new architecture?
Then there's the discussion of impacts to case and motherboard designs assuming one removes the slots entirely. Power supply was mentioned, but are there any less obvious ones, such as drive bays?
>It seems the advantages of HURD over Linux or FreeBSD, such as they are, are expandability and scalability rather than functionality. I wonder how attractive HURD will be, however, once Linux and FreeBSD have completely multi-threaded, modularized kernels.....
>Moreover, granted that the FSF goal is to get everyone using their software, I wonder if HURD has anything to convince people, and most importantly industry, to switch.
>It also seems as if it will take a year or two for HURD to be stable; in a year or two, FreeBSD and Linux are going to be so far ahead in hardware support, stability, and in functionality that HURD would seem to be useless.
>In sum, HURD seems to be a failed attempt of the FSF to totally conquer the Open Source world, an attempt doomed from the start. In truth, they are about five-ten years too late.
Actually, you're missing the whole point to Hurd. Hurd is not in competition with Linux, any more than say, OpenBSD is in competition with Linux (which it is not, incidentally).
Linux is a general purpose kernel based on familiar and well understood technology that tries to be as many things as it can be without compromising any of its existing functionality. It is a monolithic kernel with a lot of modularity built in, but still old technology.
Hurd is something of a research project aimed at the Next Generation Kernel (or Next Generation Microkernel). Trying to create a viable operating system with as much modularity as possible. Once you have a stable microkernel, you can leave the system up and upgrade vast segments of the operating system that would force even Linux to reboot.
It is not aimed at displacing Linux any more than Linux is aimed at displacing Windows. Some might say that is Linux's purpose, but others have stated that Linux is simply trying to be the best operating system it can be, with World Domination as a secondary goal. Hurd is trying to be the best kernel it can be.
And here's an interesting point. There is nothing to say that the two groups can't use each other's code, because they're both under GPL. If the Hurd group is intelligent, they'll try to take advantage of the code base of Linux and not reinvent the wheel implementing functionality already present in Linux, especially for things like hardware support.
For that matter, the Linux people might decide after a certain point that they can't modularize anymore without going to a microkernel based setup. At which point they join the Hurd project, fork off the Hurd code base, or start from scratch using information gathered from Hurd's work. In any such case Hurd will have fufilled its purpose.
In short, I think Hurd is an important part of the future of Linux, as part of determining where Linux will go in the future.
>TUXedo Kamen, surely? :-)
I'm now going to have nightmares of Tux with that funny mask throwing roses all thanks to you. Or maybe he should be throwing CD-ROMs (a lot more damage capacity with those puppies than a rose)
The article was pretty good for the most part except that I feel the author missed a few points as well.
One of the big factors that killed the N64 was lack of third party developer support, including the defections of some big Nintendo supporters in previous console generations. The reason for that was the fact that the N64 used ROM instead of CD-ROM for their medium to distribute games. The cartridges were more expensive, had less space, and only Nintendo manufactured them.
Yes, you have to go jump through a few Sony hoops to produce a playstation game, but you're free to use your own CD-ROM burning plant you like, and due to the low per-CD cost, manufacturing a set number wasn't a huge expense. Given the freedom of going to whoever they wanted to manufacture them, they could make as many or as few as they wanted.
With Nintendo, you needed to order a minimum quantity of cartridges and those puppies were expensive. As a result it cost more, you took more of a risk, and Nintendo made even more profits than before. Even worse, everyone was learning on the Sega and Sony systems how to get around the limitations of CD-ROM and to take advantage of their strengths. On cartridges, you had a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses and that made cross-system ports bad as well as developers working outside of their area of experience.
Third party support is what made Sony king and what killed Nintendo in the latest rounds. Sony barely has any in-house development but they realized that didn't make much of a difference anymore. The Playstation was simpler to program than the Saturn and I mentioned all the Nintendo problems previously. This round, Sega learned from their mistakes, as has Nintendo. Sega deliberately focused on development tools and Nintendo is going with DVD-ROM so third party supporters won't be stuck in a weird medium.
As for the all-in-one machines, I do believe that we are more ready for it now than back in the days of the 3DO. The failure of the 3DO was the price point as well as some weird licensing issues involved. In the case of the new consoles, the cost is being kept to the same competitive levels as before while the functionality is getting to the point that you're going to have those features anyway. If not this next generation, then the one after that certainly will be.
If you think about the whole thin-client phenomena, then the consoles are well poised to be the home thin client phenomena. I can easily see a home LAN set up with several consoles plugged into a home network and a PC running as the server. A cheaper solution that putting PC's all over the place, and everyone gets the benefits of a centralized network server and probable Internet gateway as well. If you really want to get easy to use, put a Cobalt box in place of the PC with the Web-based administrative interface.
Now all the consoles have all the graphics and sound horsepower you need locally to run the games, the server on the network has all of the functionality that the console lacks and needs, and you have a cheap and easy to configure solution for the consumer market. The only hard part is making the home server easy enough for consumers to use.
In time, we might even see a console that drops the DVD-ROM drive and goes entirely through a network plug for remote storage. Given the cheaper cost of a network cable compared to the hardware needed for a local disc and the way consoles like to shave hardware costs down to the penny, that is only a matter of time as well, I feel. Using a network connection entirely means you can have infinite read/write storage elsewhere on the network. You lose the ability to play CD's and DVD's but you have MP3 and MP2 functionality in the box and you download the audio and video from elsewhere. A true thin client solution.
The only problem there is that it fiddles with the economics of the console industry, which exert control over the production of media and makes the royalty collection part rather difficult. That is going to be the really interesting thing, to see how the PC economic model goes against the console economic model. In short, it's going to be an interesting future.
Voice recognition wouldn't be of great use to me, at least at the desktop. I hate leaving prolonged voicemail messages because I can't go back and edit a previous sentence. I have to go and compose a speech if I want to sound intelligent and coherent.
Voice recognition only becomes useful to me if natural language parsing and enough cognition power are available for me to command my computer in plain english to a fair degree of abstraction.
In mobile computing, it might be a lot more useful, especially for a device, say the size of the Palm Pilot, where various factors make voice far more convenient and less difficult than other forms of input.
There are a lot of human use factors that complicate voice recognition (making the computer recognize when you want it to parse your speech and when you don't want it listening). Human interface issues often make these things less wonderful than they appear.
Not that I'm saying this isn't a wonderful development and there aren't people out there who could really use this (in specialized environments or people who have mechanical difficulties), but I don't think voice recognition is going to change the world the way some people think it will.
Something to bear in mind is that there is a lot more to a typical Linux system than the kernel. Hence RMS's insistance that it be called GNU/Linux because of all the GNU tools involved. And there's the GNOME/KDE wars which occur on a level above the kernel.
Twenty years from now the kernel itself will have changed and expanded somewhat, most likely. But I feel most of the real excitement to most people will be in the layers above the kernel.
VR user interfaces, voice recognition with natural language processing, these sorts of things are a level above the kernel and will be where a lot of the excitement comes in. Most users never really 'see' the kernel when you think about it.
Kernels to some extent are supposed to be boring. Stability and reliability and predictability are traits that you'd like in a kernel, rather than the edgy excitement of never knowing when you're going to get a BSOD.
As for Linux, I see long term things like greater modularity, more network transparency, improved resource management, security and so forth. Not exactly cutting edge stuff, but the foundations on which all applications depend on.
Not that these things won't be exciting, but a lot of it will be in an understated or hidden way. The fact that you won't have memory leaks or you'll have a hundred processors on a dozen machines working together seamlessly with no fear of someone cracking your system isn't exactly glamorous, but will be important.
And the creation of physics-perfect (or deliberately twisted) virtual realities and getting your computer to understand what you speak will be the exciting processes that run on top of a rock solid kernel. Not to mention all the fun applications and games you'll have.
"But I believe that the added costs of hiring more adept people, giving them the tools and resources (PCs) to use their abilities will give the company as a whole a competitive edge. THIS is the correct reason for moving from a mainframe/terminal setup."
.profile, .kshrc and all the other custom files that make my environment nice.
In certain situations, yes. But at a place like say the bank or the DMV, the question is whether you need all those creative people and the freedom that their personal computers give them. Your ideal of a few creative people versus a lot of uncreative people only applies in certain working scenarios. At say, a retail store, I don't think getting rid of thirty uncreative clerks and replacing them with two creative clerks is going to improve service.
Certain jobs are inherently non-creative ventures and in some cases, you actually want to stick restrictions on them. Thin clients are more securable than PCs, if properly managed.
And even customization of tools doesn't write out the thin client scenario. Give the users who want special tools extra space on their disk partitions on the servers, or have them added to the application area of the disk server so everyone gets it. I use a workstation at work, but my user account comes off a server, which means that I can log into any workstation on the network and get to my account which has my
It really comes down to the degree of customization allowed by IS with respect to user accounts, and how much the client/server setup allows customization. PCs only have the advantage that IS is limited in the amount of homogenization they can remotely enforce. If you have a well considered setup, users will have all the freedom they want or need.
My suggestion is to require registration of a hidden account to let people post as Anonymous Cowards. The name that goes on the post is AC, but the scoring on the post is linked to their hidden account.
Therefore people who wish to post as AC and have a valid reason for concealing their identity may do so. It discourages casual posters and those who don't want to (or have moral objections to) register from posting, but in the long run I think it will improve things.
I started personal computing back in the late seventies when the Apple ][ was considered state of the art and practically every program in existance had some form of copy protection.
There was quite the underground industry in copy-protection breaking. Anyone remember Locksmith? The developers would think of all sorts of funky ways to tweak the Apple floppy drives and users would figure out what they did and duplicate it.
All these copy-protection schemes are going to lead to a cottage industry of mechanisms to break them. Essentially, if you hack a sound driver there's nothing the music companies can do.
MP3 has the user base and the only thing that is going to kill it is superior encoding scheme with a freely available encoder.
The advantage of Linux is that if you don't like what one Linux vendor comes out with, you can go vote with your dollars for another Linux vendor, plain and simple. You can't do that with Microsoft since they are the sole supplier of the OS.
So if you don't like Red Hat's decision not to include KDE with their version of Linux badly enough, complain to Red Hat and tell them that you're switching to another Linux vendor that will include KDE with their product.
If enough people do that, then Red Hat will relent. Its called competition, the free market, what you will. It is what keeps Red Hat or any other Linux vendor from charging $600 for the operating system and $100 for upgrades, the fact that other Linux vendors will compete, that the OS itself is freely available.
Red Hat can't control the market. It can try to lead the market and encourage standards but it can't force them the way that Microsoft did.
Onto the eternal GNOME/KDE flamewar, the average computer users don't want or need a choice of desktops and window managers. Or rather, what they want is a well established default setting that they can live with and not have to tamper with.
Red Hat and others realize this, and plan to establish GNOME and eventually some associated window manager as the default choice. Power users can go and use something else if it pleases them but the average user just wants to stick the CD-ROM in and have a nice desktop appear at the end of the process and not have to make a choice.
Choices scare the average end user, especially when they don't know the options involved or what it will cost them. They want good choices made for them already and in time if they don't like them, they can go modify them.
Computer manufacturers are also in the same boat. Most of them will need to come up with some sort of standardized installation for machines that they pre-install Linux on. Odds are good that it will end up being GNOME/Enlightenment as the default desktop.
Choice is important, but defaults are important too.
People assuming USB will be absorbed by Firewire are missing a few
points about the whole purpose of USB. Its designed to be a cheap and
flexible connector for low bandwidth devices, most especially devices
that aren't expected to have an increase in bandwidth demands over
time, and eliminate all other connectors in that area.
Keyboards have not significantly expanded their bandwidth demands over
time. Likewise mice, game controllers and so on. You might make a case
for speakers, microphones and suchlike, but even then there's a law of
diminishing returns.
Firewire is aimed at the category of devices that like to use all the
bandwidth available, and show benefits from said approach, like hard
drives, video feed equipment and such.
Sure, you could stick a keyboard on a Firewire line but what's the
point? The connector is likely to be more expensive and now you have
to worry about your hard disk slowing down your typing speed. And
given that the demands of technology will eventually force someone to
design a whole new connector better than Firewire, you have to go and
redesign your keyboards as well.
Connectors last until there's a real need to replace them. If USB is
good enough as a connector, it can last next to forever. People who
manufacture USB devices won't move off USB until its clear that their
devices are going to benefit from it or they can't continue as they
have in the past.
USB is getting established because there are limitations to serial,
parallel and a list of other ports. USB can do things they can't and
its a single standard they can all adhere to. Manufacturers and
consumers will like having a single ubiquitous standard and won't move
off of it until they have to.
In the case of Firewire, people are likely to keep demanding bigger
pipes for all those high-bandwidth devices they plug into their
machines, especially for those running servers. That will guarentee
that someday Firewire will be replaced by something with a greater
capacity than Firewire will ever have.
So Firewire attacks SCSI which attacked IDE, and someday some new
connector is going to come out with pipes so huge that people who want
their I/O to scream are going to instantly switch over to this new
Firewire successor.
Granted, the swapover will be painful, but people needing those
devices and that speed are likely to make the investment in a new
connector technology for the gains that it will bring. To swap off of
USB would require similar gains and given USB's niche, that ain't
likely to happen.
Odds are we'll see a USB-2, possible with some superior data
transmission protocols, but it won't be accepted unless its backwards
compatible (or there's a simple adaptor plug available). But the
evolution of USB given its modest target is going to be very slow.
In short, Firewire is going to attack SCSI which is attacking IDE, but
USB is going after serial, parallel, and the like. The two are going
after whole different breeds of periphial and so are not in direct
competition with each other.